I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all.

From Pinter's speech: I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all.

Particularly in societies where women are little more than property, sexual favors tend to be for sale or trade – bad news when you are a Neolithic clan in Polynesia or a paleolithic tribe in Australia and a shipload of European sailors arrive bearing metal tools, trinkets, and several strains of syphilis.

Rosie Smith, an 18-year-old from London, tells me she has been reading Edith Wharton lately, "and it's writers like that, who have been in societies where women didn't really mean anything at all, who I really look up to".

I am talking, of course, about the Drug Prohibitionists: the gaggle of politicians, bishops and journalists who still insist that the only way to deal with the very widespread drug use in our societies is for it to be criminalized, where it is untaxed, unregulated, controlled by armed criminal gangs, and horribly adulterated.